Atreyee Sinha1 & Shuchi2
1Research Scholar, National Institute of Technology Mizoram. ORCID: 0000-0001-6755-2019. Email: atreyee.lterature@gmail.com.
2Assistant Professor, National Institute of Technology Mizoram. ORCID: 0000-0001-9462-8664. Email: shuchi.hss@nitmz.ac.in.
Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 4, December, 2022. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n4.15
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Abstract
Inherited memory reflects the intensity of the impact of incidents, experienced by the ancestors on the descendants, and in the case of the partition of Bengal, these memories of memories are about both the violence-induced partition and its distressful reverberations as well as about the amiable and delightful past habitation in East Bengal. However, the awful commotion that the survivors confront steals all the researchers’ attention, pushing the amicable exhibition in the past land to the background. Again, the transportation of memory to the second generation of these refugees assists them to reconstruct as well as to dismantle the eulogized notion of the lost land and look to analyze the past incident in a more pragmatic way that consequently leads to a dichotomous intellection of the two generations, as can be found in the novella Andhar Bil O Kicchu Manush (Waterbody Named Andhar and Some People) by Bengali Dalit writer Kalyani Thakur Charal. The juvenescence dealing with the postmemory of past times by the progeny of the refugees, more specifically by a Dalit girl in this novella, paves the way for further study on the class, caste, and gendered space of Dalit women in partitioned Bengal from the perspective of a child. A deductive, analytical, and objective method has been used in this research to comprehend the factual local historiography of a particular community in a specific locality of the border region of West Bengal through a fiction based on the collective memory of the populace.
Keywords: postmemory, Bengal, Namasudra, refugee, childhood, second-generation
